How to make peace with Brexit

August 28, 2017

It’s time to make peace with Brexit …

It’s been just 13 months since the British people voted to leave the European Union. Since then my utterly awful Metropolitan Elite (™) friends have been on a warpath. A loose coalition of Champagne Socialists, Lidl Prosecco Liberals and Craft Beer Corbynistas have conspired to inform and reiterate to me just how wrong the British electorate were and how angry they are. (I am of course, for the purposes of this blogpost, above the fray and have never slighted anyone in my life.)

Brexit negotiations have started and nobody thinks they’re going well. We’ve opened Schrodingers’ box and found a cat that is not quite dead but has a grim case of scabies and quite justifiably hates us for putting it through this ordeal. The Tories want to keep this cat, even if it bites us or ruins the economy. Labour want to nurse it in a way that appeals to their feline-friendly working class voters and their more murderous metropolitan supporters. The RSPCA are nowhere to be seen, presumably because they have more important things to do than deal with laborious metaphors.

Since the referendum, I have had about three conversations a week about how badly Brexit is going. I’ve had 152 conversations that have all been the same. It’s like Groundhog Day, if Groundhog Day had been a film about a man discussing the intricacies of EU regulations and the technicalities of the customs union. It’s like Groundhog Day if Groundhog Day had been shit.

I’ve become so Bored of Brexit (incidentally the title of my upcoming book which details my disinterest over 452 pages) that I’ve devised a way to help all my friends get over it. So take heed Botanical Gin Bolsheviks! Here’s what you need to do …

Get excited for the London property market crash!

Sure, this housing crisis could be solved relatively easily with rent controls and investment in social housing but that’d make us all card-carrying Communists and we’d suddenly find ourselves living in an authoritarian dystopia. Brexit may be our only hope. When the economy inevitably crumbles, providing you still have a job, it could well be your time to get on the ladder! (But do be careful as it’ll probably be a ladder made in Britain.)

Take solace from the fact the hard Brexiteers are just as mad as you

Women still get maternity leave. Hanging continues to be illegal. Shillings have not been reintroduced. There’s no doubt the hard Brexiteers are upset. The mewling headlines of the Sun, the Mail and the Express (who have complained of ‘traitors’ and a ‘foreign elite’ seeking to ‘subvert’ Brexit) read like deranged a Twitter feed jointly run by Nigel Farage and Joseph Goebbels. We should of course, denounce the bigoted screed these second-rate publications spew but it’s also good to know we’re not alone – they’re just as unhappy as we are.

Talk to a ‘Lexiteer’

These are people on the political left who will tell you that Britain leaving the EU, a buttress against a brutal Conservative ideology of austerity and social darwinism, was definitely a good thing for workers’ rights and minorities in Britain. Talking to any of them for five minutes will ensure you never want to talk about Brexit again.

Flee

Take a trip to continental Europe or go backpacking anywhere in the world. Rest assured that nobody will bring up Brexit. You’d never mention Donald Trump to a clearly liberal American would you? No. And by the same logic, nobody will mention Brexit to you. A foolproof plan.

Rigorously following this advice will help us all move forward as we enter another 13 months of Brexit bargaining. And although by enacting the above you won’t actually achieve anything tangible, that will put you pretty much on a par with David Davis and Boris Johnson.

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